(Sean Kilpatrick/The Canadian Press via AP) Mexico's Secretary of Economy Ildefonso Guajardo Villareal, Canadian Minister of Foreign Affairs Chyrstia Freeland, and U.S. Trade Representative Robert E. Lighthizer meet during the final day of the third round of NAFTA negotiations at Global Affairs Canada in Ottawa on September 27, 2017. R enegotiations of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) are moving at warp speed, with a fourth round of talks underway this week in Washington. In a startling role reversal, the Chamber of Commerce called an emergency news conference last week to attack the U.S. agenda as “ highly dangerous .” In response, progressive Senator Sherrod Brown of Ohio announced that “it’s about time USTR took the pen away from corporate lobbyists and started writing trade policy that puts American workers first. Any trade proposal that makes multinational corporations nervous is a good sign that it’s moving in the right direction for workers.” Brown and many other...

It takes quite a “trade” agreement to undermine financial regulation, increase drug prices, flood us with unsafe imported food and products, ban Buy America policies aimed at recovery and redevelopment, and empower corporations to attack our environmental and health safeguards before tribunals of corporate lawyers. Trade, in fact, is the least of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). Backdoor deregulation and imposition of new corporate investor and patent rights via trade negotiation began in the 1990s with the World Trade Organization (WTO) and North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). But the TPP now threatens a slow-motion stealth attack against a century of progressive domestic policy. At stake is nothing less than a democratic society’s ability to regulate a market economy in the broad public interest. Under the framework now being negotiated, U.S. states and the federal government would be obliged to bring our existing and future policies into compliance with expansive norms...